I’m a third-generation physician: My grandfather was a general practitioner, my dad is an orthopedic surgeon, and I was a primary care pediatrician before moving into EHR technology and healthcare IT. It’s fascinating to think and hear about their medical experiences as I experience my own within healthcare technology. They saw it change from—in their minds—the “golden age” of medicine before billing and insurance became an administrative focus, and now I’m seeing how technology and AI are rapidly evolving the industry.
I like to think that my generation of physicians (and those before) didn’t necessarily go into medicine because we were tech-savvy. It was about caring for people and health. As technology was introduced into clinical practice, it became incredibly important to have strong change management, training, and education programs for successful adoption.
But now, many generations are tech-savvy, even those of us who aren’t from digital-native cohorts. This has been a huge equalizer. The bar isn’t as high from a change management perspective, and there isn’t the previous distrust or fear of technology. We now see that if innovative tools can help make it super easy for clinicians to do the right evidence-based action for better patient care, that is very powerful and compelling.
GenAI is a new technology era for clinicians
The adoption rate of enterprise AI tools in healthcare has been incredible; it’s leading other industries, and I’ve never seen tech adopted the way it is today. I think this boils down to AI solving real-world pain points for clinicians.
For example, as a physician, the EHR rollout didn’t necessarily solve a problem I had. Of course, in the long term, it was better for patient safety, centralized organizational data, and made it easier to send an order to the lab or the pharmacy. But there wasn’t a tactical problem it was solving in my daily workflow.
AI solutions are actually solving for real clinician pain points. Ambient voice technology and diction are making note-taking easier, letting clinicians keep their focus on the patient and maintain eye contact, instead of looking down to write notes or enter them into an EHR. Relevant clinical decision support is now in the workflow, removing cognitive burden. Instead of a busy clinician stopping what they’re doing to read an UpToDate® topic, they can get a quick generative AI (GenAI) response or access related evidence through ambient integrations, and then move on with their day. These evidence-based tools and the clinical experts behind them can help distill the vast amounts of medical knowledge into succinct, actionable insights.
